Translation

I did not succeed in mastering the transference in good time . . . . At the beginning it was clear that I was replacing her father in her imagination, which was not unlikely, in view of the difference between our ages.

Sigmund Freud, 1905

Curator's Comments

Freud blamed his inability to help Dora on his failure to understand the transference early enough. She, he later decided, had been using him to act out her hostile feelings towards her father. She had seen him as a father figure but, Freud asked, with what encouragement on his part? Freud considered whether he had unwittingly assumed a role Dora wanted him to play, even as she refused the role the doctor prescribed for her.